Europe takes bold steps to restore nature in large areas of the continent

Also this week: North America's national parks, Michael Lewis's startling comments about Samuel Bankman-Fried and the therapeutic benefit of wind phones

(Photo of meadows in the Alps by Michael Lee on Unsplash)

Europe has taken a bold and ambitious step in environmental protection.

Last week the European Parliament adopted a groundbreaking law designed to safeguard biodiversity and restore natural habitats in extensive parts of the continent. Officials estimate that over 80 per cent of habitats in Europe currently are in poor condition. The new legislation goes beyond environmental protection: it actually sets targets to bring nature back to health in large areas of both land and sea.

The goal is to restore at least 20 per cent of European territory by 2030, just six years from now.

Of those protected areas, member states must restore at least one third of the habitats to "good condition" by 2030. Every decade after that, the goal is restore to healthy status more land and sea in those areas. By 2040, the protected areas considered in good condition must comprise 60 per cent of the total, and by 2050 it must be 90 per cent.

The overall goal is to achieve the European Union's (EU) climate and biodiversity objectives and improve food security.

Some European farmers and populist groups protested against the new legislation. Along with recent grievances related to inflation, cheap imports and environmental restrictions, farmers are worried about the additional bureaucracy being imposed on them. They are also concerned about impacts on their profits because they are required to create more biodiversity on agricultural land.

The legislation accordingly included a kind of “relief valve” for farmers: targets for agricultural ecosystems can be suspended in exceptional cases, if they severely reduce land for food production destined for European consumption.

A coalition of other groups, including the European Environmental Bureau, applauded the measures.

The law was adopted with 329 votes in favour, 275 against and 24 abstentions.

The legislation also requires the planting of three billion additional trees (3,000 million) and sustaining efforts to protect existing urban tree canopies. It also calls for the rewetting of drained peatlands.

In a press release on February 27th, European Parliament environmental committee vice chair César Luena said:

Today is an important day for Europe, as we move from protecting and conserving nature to restoring it. The new law will also help us to fulfil many of our international environmental commitments. The regulation will restore degraded ecosystems while respecting the agricultural sector by giving flexibility to member states. I would like to thank scientists for providing the scientific evidence and fighting climate denial and young people for reminding us that there is no planet B, nor plan B.

The deal now awaits final approval by the Council of the EU. It's expected the law will be ratified before the summer.

More info:

Nature Restoration in Europe: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20240223STO18042/nature-restoration-taking-better-care-of-habitats-in-the-eu

European Parliament press release: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240223IPR18078/nature-restoration-parliament-adopts-law-to-restore-20-of-eu-s-land-and-sea

European Environmental Bureau: https://eeb.org/european-parliament-seals-the-deal-on-nature-restoration-law-2/

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Yellowstone anniversary

(Photo by LaiLa Skalsky on Unsplash)

On the topic of preserving nature: it was in March, 1872, that the Congress of the United States established the first national park in the country. The protected area was Yellowstone, located in northwestern Wyoming, and partially in Montana and Idaho. It is still the largest and arguably the most iconic of the American national parks. Known for its many hydrothermal features, including the much-photographed Old Faithful geyser, Yellowstone is home to many types of wildlife and an abundant network of rivers. In 1976 it was designated a UNESCO biosphere reserve, and two years later, a World Heritage Site. There are 63 national parks in the United States.

Old Faithful geyser (Photo by Dietmar Rabich)

In Canada, the national parks system began in 1885, when the Cave and Basin Hot Springs in Alberta's Rocky Mountains were set aside for public use. They are situated on the northern slope of Sulphur Mountain, which we know today as Banff National Park. The hot springs had been visited by indigenous peoples for some time, but they became known to settlers when three labourers working on the transcontinental railway came across them in 1883. In June, 1887, the Canadian parliament passed the Rocky Mountains Park Act, establishing Banff as a national park. Canada now has 48 of these parks.

Photo of Banff National Park by David Wirzba on Unsplash

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Writer Michael Lewis adopts a disturbing analogy in describing the downfall of FTX cryptocurrency founder Samuel Bankman-Fried

Michael Lewis (2009 file photo)

An intriguing comment by best-selling author Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short, Liar’s Poker, etc.) recently caught my attention.

In December Lewis was interviewed on a podcast by Stephen J. Dubner about Lewis's latest book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. It's about Sam Bankman-Fried, the young founder of the collapsed FTX cryptocurrency exchange. In November the financial trader was tried and found guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy.

Sam Bankman-Fried (By Creative Commons license. Info here)

As he prepared the biography, Lewis spent months before the trial with Bankman-Fried. He had many opportunities to observe his subject’s interactions with colleagues and people in the community. While Bankman-Fried is truly gifted in some areas, such as a knack for dealing with probabilities, Lewis believes he also has a dominant personality flaw: an almost complete lack of empathy.

In the interview with Dubner, Lewis adopted an unusual analogy to explain Bankman-Fried's decision-making methods. He drew a connection to artificial intelligence models and the need for rules.

Pexels.com, photo by Pixabay

DUBNER: When you say he replaced principles with probabilities — it strikes me that that’s a good way of describing the fear that’s going on right now of what A.I. is going to do.

LEWIS: That’s funny you say this. When I was thinking about what this story was a parable for, when I was writing it, one of the things that kept popping in my head was a parable for A.I. It was like a foreshadowing of what happens when you let an artificial intelligence loose in the world with a goal — telling it what to do, but not telling you how to do it, right?

So, you tell it to get a reservation at your favorite restaurant tomorrow night, and it goes out and finds that the restaurant’s fully booked and starts to kill the people who have reservations to get you a table. That’s Sam Bankman-Fried. That’s Sam Bankman-Fried. He’s programmed himself to make as much money as possible to then spend to defray existential risk to humanity without any instructions about what he can’t do in order to do that. I felt at any given moment, when he’s making his decisions, he was always on pretty shaky ground in his calculations. Like, I don’t know what the probability of A.I. wiping us all out, or some pandemic wiping us all out, or an asteroid hitting the Earth. But neither does he. And yet he’s putting, very confidently, numbers on these things and acting on these numbers.

- From the Freakonomics Radio podcast entitled, Why Are People So Mad at Michael Lewis?

Despite the harshness of this particular comment, a lot of people, as the podcast title implies, feel that Lewis was too sympathetic to Bankman-Fried in the way he portrayed him in the book.

Lewis counters by saying he wanted readers to make up their own minds about him, based on personal observations, comments from people who worked with him, and the evidence presented at the trial.

You can listen to the whole conversation here, or read the book to make up your own mind. The jury deliberated only four-and-a-half hours before delivering its verdict.

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Wind phones provide comfort and healing

Dealing with the loss of a loved one is a slow and painful process. Sometimes you wish you could just reach out and talk to them. Or let the wind take your thoughts to wherever they may be.

Fourteen years ago, a man in Japan, Itaru Sasaki, was grieving the loss of his cousin, taken by cancer. Sasaki decided to do something. He set up an empty phone booth in a garden. In the booth, he placed a telephone, not connected to any wires or network. It became his private place to go and "call" his cousin, to say things he wished he could say in person. Speaking this way comforted Sasaki and helped him overcome his grief.

He called his phone booth "The Telephone of the Wind." He hoped the wind would take his words to the one he loved.

The wind phone in Ōtsuchi, Japan. (Photo by Matthew Komatsu)

When, a year later, an earthquake and devastating tsunami killed thousands of people in coastal Japan, Sasaki decided to open his booth to anyone mourning the disappearance of friends or relatives killed by the tsunami. He relocated the booth to a spot overlooking the Pacific Ocean, near the town of Ōtsuchi. Many people came to use his telephone.

Now, these "wind phones" are found all over the world, often along nature trails, where grievers come to call their loved ones. In these locations, in the midst of bird songs and the sound of the breeze blowing through the trees, they find the space to express themselves and find comfort. Flowers may someday grow where tears fall.

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Wind phones

If you’d like to see some of these places, a web site, mywindphone.com, offers a curated photo gallery of different locations in many countries. You can browse it here.

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Thanks for reading this newsletter. If you know anyone who might be interested in what I write about, please send them a link. Referrals by existing readers is one of the best ways.

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My closing sketch this week is of a tree in Vancouver.

Until next time,

-Renato